lifetime learners' litigation —

Deaf group sues Harvard, MIT over online courses

Disability group that sued Netflix over online captions turns to universities.

The National Association for the Deaf (NAD) filed a lawsuit (PDF) against Harvard and MIT yesterday, saying the two universities are violating the Americans with Disabilities Act because they don't properly caption their online course offerings.

Harvard's online courses aren't really intended for students at the Ivy League university. Rather, the thousands of videos made available are part of the University's "commitment to equity,” an effort "to create effective, accessible avenues for people who desire to learn but who may not have an opportunity to obtain a Harvard education."

The problem with Harvard's offering, NAD lawyers say, is that it leaves out hard-of-hearing people. "Much of Harvard’s online content is either not captioned, or is inaccurately or unintelligibly captioned, making it inaccessible for individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing," the complaint reads. "Just as buildings without ramps bar people who use wheelchairs, online content without captions excludes individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing."

A similar lawsuit was filed against MIT. Both universities were early adopters of edX, a service that offers lectures from top universities online.

In the Harvard suit, the platforms named include YouTube, iTunes U, SoundCloud, and Harvard@Home.

Both schools declined to comment on the suits. A Harvard spokesperson told Reuters that the university was expecting guidelines from the Department of Justice on the issue to be published in June and that Harvard would follow those guidelines.

The same law firm represented NAD in its lawsuit against Netflix, which ended in a 2012 settlement in which Netflix agreed to caption all of its "Watch Instantly" offerings. The advocacy group reached a deal with Vudu earlier this week.

The lawsuit against the universities raises a thorny issue: how to provide accommodations for disabled people without raising costs to the point that it could slow or stop public service initiatives. Harvard and MIT may have substantial resources to address captioning issues, but those well-known schools are clearly intended as test cases—NAD has made it clear that it expects all universities to caption content, just as they must make their physical spaces accessible to wheelchair users.

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have become popular with smaller institutions as well. Some of them may choose not to broadcast courses online if the cost of doing so is the type of 100-percent accurate captioning that Netflix and Vudu have agreed to.